HUMILITY

I have nothing to add.

He who lives by the crystal ball will eat shattered glass.

The most important thing you can do is to know what you don't know.

I could be wrong. I need to make sure I can survive being wrong.

In this business, if you're good, you're right six times out of ten. You're never going to be right nine times out of ten.

To achieve satisfactory investment results is easier than most people realize; to achieve superior results is harder than it looks.

Once we realize that imperfect understanding is the human condition, there is no shame in being wrong — only in failing to correct our mistakes.

I'm only rich because I know when I'm wrong.

We're not smarter than everyone else. We just worked harder on this one trade.

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they cannot lose.

I've made a lot of mistakes in my career. I own them all. The key is not making the same mistake twice.

Every model is wrong. Some models are useful. The goal isn't perfection — it's being roughly right.

Cloning is a very powerful idea. Find someone who's already figured it out and just copy them.

I'm a shameless cloner. I have no original ideas. And that's perfectly fine.

I shorted Netflix and it taught me that being smart about valuation doesn't mean you're right about the stock.

My biggest mistakes have all come from shorting great companies that I thought were overvalued.

Risk is what's left over after you think you've thought of everything.

I've spent decades in hedge funds. The main thing I learned is that most people in finance are wrong most of the time.

Every financial crisis looks obvious in hindsight. At the time, everyone involved thought they were being clever.

I used to think I could beat the market picking stocks. The data convinced me otherwise.

Going from $46 billion to $6.7 billion in one year teaches you things that no business school ever could.

We still ride our bicycles to work. My wife and I live in a modest apartment in Mainz. The vaccine made us billionaires on paper. It didn't change who we are.

People will write case studies about us. $120 million in funding. $600K in revenue. It's going to be in business school textbooks under the chapter called "What Not To Do."

I became the youngest self-made billionaire in America at 25. That sounds impressive. What actually happened is I built a data labeling company during the biggest AI boom in history. The timing was the hard part. The labeling was the easy part.

Respect the market. It is bigger than you, smarter than you, and it has been around longer than you. The moment you think you have it figured out is the moment it teaches you a lesson.

I don't give interviews because I have nothing to say that would help anyone. The market teaches you everything if you pay attention.

The most dangerous moment for any company is when it starts believing its own success is inevitable. That's when disruption walks through the door.

I sold a company to Twitch in my twenties and thought I'd figured it out. Then I realized selling a company and knowing how to invest are completely different skills. Humility is expensive but worth it.

I started Redwood in my garage in Nevada. People ask why the Tesla CTO was working in a garage. Because that's where you start when you're solving a problem nobody else is working on yet.

We lost $1.35 billion on Washington Mutual. It was a reminder that even after decades of experience, you can still get it catastrophically wrong.

We manage $900 billion and most people have never heard of us. That is exactly how we like it.

I became a billionaire at 26. That does not make me wise. It makes me lucky. Wisdom is what you do with the luck.

I do not make predictions about the market. I just try to buy good businesses at good prices.

I still deliver food sometimes. You cannot run a delivery company if you have never delivered anything.

The iBuying experiment cost us $881 million in one quarter. That is an expensive lesson in humility. The algorithm does not know everything.

When I became CEO my mother said that is nice dear but can you go get some milk. That is motherhood for you.

The IPO was supposed to be a celebration. The stock dropped 27 percent on day one. Markets have a way of humbling you.

Sequoia invested. Accel invested. The best VCs in the world backed us. Smart money is not always right.

I was COO of Lyft and VP at Uber. I thought I understood mobility. Scooters taught me that hardware in public spaces is a different game entirely.

Jeff Bezos invested personally. When Bezos backs your logistics company you think you have figured it out. We had not.

Hospitals spend 30 percent of revenue on admin. That is a real problem. We just were not the real solution.

I took eBay from 30 employees to 15,000 and eight billion in revenue. Then I lost a governor's race and joined Quibi. Life is a mixed bag.

Being great at one company does not make you great at everything. I learned that the hard way. Three times.

I never wanted to be famous. I just wanted to build great things.

The four most dangerous words in investing are: this time it's different.

My Luna tattoo will be a constant reminder that investing requires humility.

The market is never wrong — opinions often are.

Every great investor has been humbled by the market. The ones who survive learn from it. The ones who don't repeat it.

An investor who has all the answers doesn't even understand the questions.

I'm not smarter than the market. I'm just more patient.

I prefer to let my work speak for itself. I have nothing to say to the press.

There is only one boss — the customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.

Celebrate your successes. Find some humor in your failures. Don't take yourself so seriously.

I donate because everything I have comes from grace, not from my own merit.

Stepping down as CEO was the hardest decision of my life. Sometimes the best thing for the company isn't you.

Going from the hottest company in America to a 97% stock decline teaches you everything about humility.

A $4 billion valuation and a 97% stock crash. That's the DTC rollercoaster.

I grew up sharing a room with three siblings in Madeira. I never forget where I came from.

I generated 25% annual returns for a decade. Then I tried to run a retailer. Humility is a lesson, not a choice.

I've always been a contrarian. The problem with being a contrarian is that sometimes the crowd is right and you're the fool.

I don't predict. I react. The models follow the data, not my opinions.

Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to running Guggenheim. The Midwest teaches you to work hard and stay humble.

In South Africa, we know that empires can fall overnight. That makes you humble about permanence.

Owning a baseball team taught me that the skills that make you a great player don't necessarily make you a great executive.

I started at GM checking hoods and fenders on the factory floor. The company gave me a chance, and I never forgot where I came from.

I don't need to be famous. I need to be right. And Spotify proved I was right.

Being number two teaches you things being number one never will. Resourcefulness, creativity, and the value of every single customer.

The model predicted $100K by end of 2021. Bitcoin hit $69K. Close, but the miss taught me about the limits of any single model.

I found a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works.

I was a ticket collector. People forget that. I never forget it. It keeps me grounded and it keeps me hungry.

Being the smartest person in the room is only useful if you're in the right room.

Swimming taught me that you can train harder than everyone else and still lose. Markets are the same. Effort is necessary but not sufficient.

I missed the shale revolution. Anyone who says they saw it coming at scale is lying or got lucky.

My job as a board member is to be useful, not to be in charge. Founders build companies. I help.

We maintain the Anti-Portfolio because honesty about misses makes our hits more credible.

You do not need to be loud to be powerful.

Every great investment I have made started with a conversation where the founder changed my mind about something I thought I understood.

I am not a genius. I am just someone who worked harder and longer than most people were willing to.

Being the youngest self-made billionaire in America sounds cool until you realize your stock is down 90% and everyone thinks your industry is overhyped.

We do not need to be famous. We need to be affordable.

We started on a horse farm. The horses made serums. The serums made vaccines. The vaccines made everything else.

Zakat is not a tax. It is a cure for greed. It reminds you that your wealth does not belong entirely to you.

The market is smarter than we are and always will be.

The ability to say 'I don't know' is the most underrated skill in investing.

There are two kinds of investors, be they large or small: those who don't know where the market is headed, and those who don't know that they don't know.

A leader's job is not to stand at the top of the pyramid. It is to be the foundation beneath everyone else.

I am just a part of the community. The community built Wikipedia, not me.

During crises, markets panic, and investor forecasts become too correlated in predicting worse to come. But the humble investor knows that these dire predictions are unlikely to come to pass, as unlikely as the fever dreams that characterize stock manias.

We say no quickly, and we know we will get things wrong.

VCs get quite full of themselves.

A good chess player usually knows and accepts the fact that he himself is a chess piece in a bigger game.

I am an insecure guy, I always want to be better.